It feels like summer outside, but the Laguna Woods Chinese American Club is celebrating the fall harvest season and the Mid-Autumn Festival.

The important holiday falls on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese calendar, with a full moon at night, says Mike Yang, the club’s president.

This year, that’s Saturday, Sept. 10, through Monday, Sept. 12.

The festival is “something like Thanksgiving,” says club member Janny Lee, who has lived in Laguna Woods Village for almost 20 years.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, which is based on an ancient Chinese legend, is also known as the Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival. To mark the occasion, the Chinese American Club handed out more than 600 mooncakes to its members at a tiered event Aug. 29 in Clubhouse 1.

The perfectly round mooncakes, eaten during the festival in a tradition that goes back thousands of years,  symbolize the full moon as well as family reunion and togetherness, Yang says. The rich pastry typically is filled with sweet-bean, meat or lotus-seed paste along with an egg yolk, further symbolizing the full moon.

So where does one find more than 600 mooncakes to buy?

“To tell you the truth, we got them from Costco in Irvine,” Yang said.